On July 4, 2026 — today — two of China's largest AI platforms made the same announcement within hours of each other. ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen will shut down all user-customized AI agent features on July 15. The timing is not a coincidence. July 15 is also the day China's Administrative Measures on AI Anthropomorphic Interaction Services takes effect.
The regulation, jointly issued by five government departments in April — the Cyberspace Administration, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, and the State Administration for Market Regulation — establishes a formal governance framework for AI services that simulate human personality, thought patterns, and conversational style. The two platforms shutting down agent features on the regulation's enforcement date is the first concrete signal of how this framework will reshape China's AI ecosystem.
For overseas brands using or planning to use AI platforms in their China marketing strategy, the implications are immediate and specific.
🔍 What Is Happening
The announcements are unusually coordinated. Doubao published a Doubao AI Agent Feature Shutdown Notice on July 4, stating the feature will be discontinued on July 15 due to "product function adjustment." After July 15, no new agents can be created, and existing agents will stop functioning. Users have until October 15 to back up their data. Tongyi Qianwen followed with a similar notice: anthropomorphic interaction agents and user-built agents will be disabled on July 10, with full shutdown on July 15.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| July 4 | Doubao + Tongyi Qianwen announce shutdown |
| July 10 | Tongyi: anthropomorphic agents disabled |
| July 15 | Both platforms fully shut down agent features |
| October 15 | Data backup window closes |
The regulation these moves are responding to defines anthropomorphic interaction services as "continuous emotional interaction services that use AI to simulate natural person personality traits, thought patterns, and communication styles." The scope is broad — it covers any AI system designed to engage users in human-like conversation, including brand personas, customer service agents, and interactive marketing characters.
⚠️ Why This Matters for Brands
For the past two years, many brands operating in China have been building customized AI agents on Doubao and Tongyi Qianwen — brand ambassadors that chat with customers, interactive product guides, and personality-driven marketing bots. These agents were a growth channel that sat at the intersection of customer experience and AI visibility. Their removal on July 15 represents the first direct impact of AI regulation on the marketing tools available to brands in China.
The shutdown also carries a larger signal. It confirms that the five-department regulation is being enforced with teeth, and that platforms are preemptively removing features rather than waiting for compliance orders. The regulatory trajectory that began with the AIIA GEO safety pledge in February, accelerated through the March 315 CCTV exposure of AI poisoning, and culminated in the GEO Red Book in June, is now producing operational changes with compliance deadlines measured in days, not quarters.
📊 The Bigger Picture
The urgency of understanding these regulatory shifts is amplified by a structural change in how Chinese consumers access information. According to Analysys International's China GEO Industry Development Report 2026, the click-through rate on traditional search blue links has dropped from 45% to 18% in three years. The traffic that used to go to search result pages is now going to AI-generated answers. IDC data shows AI-driven search has crossed the 45% substitution threshold for traditional search engines.
When AI platforms remove features, they do not just remove a feature — they reshape the surface area on which brands can appear. The agents being shut down on July 15 were, for many brands, their most direct form of AI-native presence. With those agents gone, the question becomes: what replaces them, and how do you appear there?
What Overseas Brands Need to Do Now
There are three immediate actions for any overseas brand with a China marketing presence:
1️⃣ Audit your AI agent footprint. If your brand has built custom agents on Doubao, Tongyi Qianwen, or any other Chinese AI platform, identify them now. Back up the data before the October 15 deadline. Understand what engagement metrics were being driven through those agents and plan for the gap.
2️⃣ Shift focus to passive AI visibility. The regulatory trend points toward a distinction between AI systems that actively engage users in conversation (regulated under the new measures) and AI systems that passively surface authoritative brand information in response to queries (increasingly valuable). The GEO framework we have been covering this week — information infrastructure, structured content, credible source networks, and continuous monitoring — becomes more important, not less, when active agent channels are closed.
3️⃣ Do not assume this is the last regulatory action. The anthropomorphism regulation is the first of what is likely to be a sequence. The GEO Red Book established governance standards. The four-stage framework provided an implementation path. The service provider evaluation criteria defined how to select partners. Each of these is a response to a regulatory signal. There will be more.
✅ What BPP Does About It
BPP does not build AI agents, so this shutdown does not directly affect our services. But we operate at the point where overseas brand presence meets China's AI ecosystem, and the regulatory direction is clear: content that gets surfaced by AI will be judged by standards that are getting stricter.
For the brands we work with, this means three things in practical terms:
- Content authenticity documentation: Every piece of Chinese-language content we produce traces back to verifiable English source material. This is not a marketing claim — it is a compliance requirement that maps directly to the regulatory framework emerging across GEO and anthropomorphism rules.
- Passive visibility optimization: With active agent channels closing, passive visibility — being cited correctly by AI when users ask questions — becomes the primary growth mechanism. We optimize for this as a core service, not an afterthought.
- Regulatory monitoring: We track Chinese AI platform policy changes as they happen. When Doubao and Tongyi Qianwen make coordinated announcements on a Saturday, we do not read about it on Monday — we know it the same day, and our clients do not get surprised.
The anthropomorphism regulation taking effect on July 15 is not a crisis. It is the next step in a regulatory sequence that has been unfolding all year. Brands that treat each step as a signal to improve their compliance posture will end up with a stronger AI presence than brands that scramble to react after the fact.
This article is part of BPP's ongoing coverage of China's AI regulatory landscape. Previous installments: GEO Red Book 2026, Four-Stage GEO Framework, GEO Service Provider Evaluation.